Hellgate London - Bill Roper on A Rough Launch

CVG posts an excerpt from a paper article in the February issue of PCZone magazine which features Flagship Studio's CEO Bill Roper discussing the rough early release days of Hellgate:

"I think that people had incredibly high expectations that we simply didn't meet", Flagship boss Bill Roper has admitted in an interview with PC Zone on Hellgate: London.

Looking back the RPG was surrounded by hefty anticipation due to it hailing from the team responsible for the Diablo series, but it ended up experiencing a rocky launch last year, blighted by major bugs.

"…we simply tried to do too much with the game", Roper says in retrospect…Rather than try to shove responsibility for the rough launch onto others, the CEO says Flagship will take the blame for not getting enough testing done…However, he adds that the issues when the game launched were less to do with the total months of testing - "which were numerous" - and more to do with the vast number of issues that came up right at the end.

For one there isn't enough in the game unlike what he says about them doing too much. Other games I have played (even from small developers) have much more than this game.

I was a tester on this game and they ignored a lot of major problems that had been problems for awhile and not right at the end. An example of this is the problems with the robot you get as an engineer which had long topics long before I became a tester.

Originally Posted by Remus
People had high anticipation because in most previews they keep hyping the game and mentioned Diablo repeatedly.

Amazon Germany is an most infamous example for this. The very first reader previews/reviews were … BEEEP

My favourite from that (translated):

"A game by Bill Roper … there is no bad game by Bill Roper and I don't believe that there will ever be one.
I believe it's enough to look at the preceding titles."

That Reviewer compared Hellgate - although he seemed not to have played it at that point - to the works by Blizzard.

— “ Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.“ (E.F.Schumacher, Economist, Source)